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- [00:02]
Professor Jeff Dudas
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- [00:16]
Professor Stephen Dyson
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- [00:21]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Sprite obey your thirst.
- [00:25]
Professor Stephen Dyson
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- [00:38]
Professor Jeff Dudas
So bring your gift list and your.
- [00:39]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Wish list to your nearest Nordstrom rack today. This episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless while being a.
- [00:54]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Part of legendary nights.
- [00:56]
Professor Stephen Dyson
From backyard jams to sold out arenas, there's a song in every toast. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org, jack Daniels and Old no.
- [01:03]
Professor Jeff Dudas
7 are registered trademarks.
- [01:05]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Tennessee whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee.
- [01:11]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:15]
Professor Stephen Dyson
It's the pop Culture professors. And today we continue our analyses of the Apple TV series Pluribus. First we have our analysis of episode six hdp, followed by our analysis of episode seven, the Gap. I'm Professor Stephen Dyson.
- [01:31]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And I'm Professor Jeff Dudas.
- [01:32]
Professor Stephen Dyson
And we are two political science professors who have just watched episode six of Pluribus, the Apple TV series from Vince Gilligan. We're here to give our fairly instant reactions break down what we see as the key plot points, the key thematic elements. Jeff, episode six hdp. Turns out that stands for human derived Protein.
- [01:53]
Professor Jeff Dudas
It does. And so I thought my quick takeaway from this week, I again, I really liked this episode. I thought it was really smartly constructed. I thought it had a lot of movement to it, just sort of in terms of narrative structure. I really liked the movement from one setting to another. I really liked the reorientation of each section of the three parts of the episode around a different central character. So again, I think the show continues to be really smartly constructed and thought through. What did you think of this week's episode?
- [02:26]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Absolutely fascinating episode. I noticed that it was, you know, as you say, it's split into a three part structure and I think that's maybe where we should start. And it's focused around the, I think what are now the three central characters, especially since Zoji's kind of disappeared off the scene. So you have the start with Carol, right. Which kind of pays off last week's cliffhanger, which is, Carol has discovered something. What is it? And I think, fairly unsurprisingly, it turns out that the Soylent Green predictions are correct, so that the thing that's in the milk is people. And, you know, so that's kind of the first part of the episode. You've then got the. Maybe the most substantial sort of middle chunk, which begins with Diabarde Kuma d', Abbade, who's in Las Vegas living the life of Riley, or as it turns out, actually the life of James Bond. Yes. And then Carol comes and kind of meets him, and you have a long and important kind of segment there. And then the end part of the episode returns us to Minuta Soviedo and in Paraguay, who I think a commenter had had pointed out, I'd said minus Oviedo was testing radio frequencies, looking for survivors, and a commenter had said, no, that's not what he's doing. He's scanning radio frequencies because he's looking for a form of communication amongst the members of the Pluribus. Because essentially, you know, how is the hive mind connected?
- [03:46]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah.
- [03:47]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right. It can't be connected by the mind's electrical field or whatever, or telekinesis. That doesn't exist. Controversial statement that. That. That doesn't exist. Tell us in the comments if that's not. If that's true or not. But telekinesis, as far as we know, doesn't exist. A mind's electrical field only goes, you know. You know, not even as far as I am to you. They must be using some sort of radio wave or carrier wave. And I think that's what Manusis Oviedo finds, whereupon he alights on essentially sort of a road trip.
- [04:16]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah.
- [04:17]
Professor Stephen Dyson
You know, a Mad Max style or the road style, or, you know, some of the.
- [04:21]
Professor Jeff Dudas
I mean, what's interesting about that part of the episode is that at the same moment that he finds the frequency, or at least seems to find the frequency, he is also finding one of Carol's videos. Right. The first one, in fact, I think it's the first one. Right. That she has sent. And so these two sort of plot points converge in Aviedo's storyline to sort of catapult him out of his survivalist, like, isolation.
- [04:49]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right. And so that gives us. You'd made a really smart point, Jeff, which is the sort of genre play that's going on in Pluribus.
- [04:57]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah.
- [04:57]
Professor Stephen Dyson
And there's. There's sort of a metageneric question and then. And Then a micro generic question, the metageneric question is the one that we've been wrestling with in all of these videos. And I think there are divergent readings of the text based upon what genre you think it's in. I have been reading it and I think you have too. But correct me if I'm wrong, as a work of speculative fiction, and that carries with it a set of kind of ideological. On normative understandings, you know, one of which is it's, it's. It's going to be something that appears to be real or is in dialogue with our world, but is changed in some crucial way that shines a critical light on our world. The famous kind of dark or soothing concepts of cognitive estrangement. The world that's different from our own world, but contains the new thing, the northern, that kind of renders our world in flux when High Castle. Yeah, exactly, that kind of thing. And the Northern here is the hive mind. All the pluribus. Okay. That's how I'd been reading it. And from that standpoint, the characters in the show are gonna be vectors for ideas rather than examples of psychological realism that are intended to be true to real people or treated as real people and kind of rooted for or against. And there is a generic question as to whether we're right about that or whether it's really a literary show, a literary fiction show in which we should be on the side of some protagonists and against other protagonists and kind of judging them in moral ways. There's that generic question and then the micro generic question was contained within this episode. And I think this is your theory, Jeff, that the three part structure we've identified actually is Vince Gilligan playing with three different genres within even this one episode.
- [06:36]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, I really liked this structural element. So the first third, it's not quite the first third, but maybe the first 10 minutes of this episode. The first act, I guess, is a way to put it, which features, as you, as you say, Carol kind of paying off last week's cliffhanger where she makes her big discovery that is really. It's the found footage variant of the horror genre in which she is engaged. She's got the handheld camera, she is narrating. It's very shaky. At one point she turns the camera on her own face. It's very obviously, it seems to me, a throwback to the Blair Witch Project and that entire kind of guerrilla genre of horror movies from the early part of.
- [07:17]
Professor Stephen Dyson
No, it was a witch, it wasn't a gorilla. Thank you.
- [07:21]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Then we get, as you've alluded to already. We shift into the second act of this week's episode and it is pure Casino Royale. It's pure James Bond.
- [07:31]
Professor Stephen Dyson
And he's even got the white tux from Casino Royale.
- [07:34]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And so in this portion of the episode, the character who is centered is not the last girl of the found footage horror genre, Carol in this case, but rather it's Diabate. It's James Bond and it's James Bond amped up to cartoonish and ludicrously sort of self absorbed heights.
- [07:55]
Professor Stephen Dyson
I mean he's already quite self absorbed in the James Bond universe.
- [08:00]
Professor Jeff Dudas
There's something about setting this character in Las Vegas that is exactly correct.
- [08:04]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right.
- [08:05]
Professor Jeff Dudas
It's one of the funny things I thought about the portrayal or the particularly ludicrous things about the portrayal of date this week is that his penthouse features these kinds of portraits of himself in various moments of repose.
- [08:20]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Well, including in the bathroom.
- [08:23]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And there's only one, we're only shown I think one portrait on the wall that is not of dbate and it's of the sort of Las Vegas era, Elvis Presley. Right. The monument to excess and as self regard and kind of larger than life figure in Elvis's career. So we've got this Casino Royale and I think we'll probably talk a bit more right about it. But here, here the, the character who is centered is the kind of the James Bond type super spy, although he's not actually a spy, Diabate, he's just kind of living the playboy, extreme playboy lifestyle. And then in the final chunk, the third act we get, we return to Oviedo and here it's pure survivalist story. So here the reference are things like the Road or even like the Last of Us or you know, any of those sort of post apocalyptic shows that have become especially prominent over the last 20 years or so of American popular entertainment. And the, the character Oviedo, who we already know has kind of holed himself up in this gated self storage office, leaves it, but it undertakes all of the aesthetic tones and elements of the classic survivalist story. And where does his story end for this week? Well, it ends with him packing up his bags and lighting out in a broken down vehicle to travel a long way from Paraguay through whatever the land route is. I'm not sure if that's the Darien Gap. We were trying to figure this out off camera. I don't know if there is a roadway through the Darien Gap, but some way somehow he's going to be able to get via land to New Mexico, hopefully.
- [10:08]
Professor Stephen Dyson
I mean, his car doesn't seem right. Like the sturdiest steed to accomplish that.
- [10:13]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Oviedo becomes the classic kind of Last.
- [10:15]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Survivor, Mad Max or whatever. Yeah, yeah. And presumably will face challenges along the way. You know, that I think is where it's going. Yeah. Super interesting. And it does. This is a fictional show that is. That is playing in a meta way with notions of fiction and reality and genre in a very sort of writerly way. And I continue to think it's super significant that Carol is an author of fantastic fiction in herself. That she herself skewers her own fantastic fiction. She's not a sincere advocate of that kind of work. And that in that three act structure that you've just outlined, our three central characters are all sort of living a fictional fantasy of how to exist in this new situation. Right. So. So Carol's kind of fictional fantasy is the. It has been like the Detective, you know, and Agatha Christie last week. And now it's including the kind of Last Girl trope, what's his name? Diabardi's fantasy has been from the start a sort of international man of mystery, James Bond type of thing.
- [11:20]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And such a fantasy as Diabatti's imagination that he's literally play acting these scenes out of Casino Royale, including, as you noted, really some of the same kinds of character archetypes from the Casino Royale Daniel Craig text. His main opponent at the table has only one functioning eye.
- [11:42]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right, Right. Like Le Chiffre had that kind of scar, didn't he? And that is a classic villain drop. Right. The villain has to be marked you usually facially. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, and also he's instructed the members of the Pluribus to do this. Yeah. And it is very interesting you'd said something last week that there was a hint that the Pluribus were not scared of Carol, but were sort of turned off by her. And there's also a hint that they're at least a hint that they're not really into Diabardi's kind of fantasy. Because when the Le Chiffre character at the end takes off his mask, he looks kind of like, this is the stupidest thing I've ever. Even though he's part of a hive mind, he's not. He's not like this. This was fantastic. Which he's like, this is a waste of time. Let me now clean up the mess of your fantasy.
- [12:27]
Professor Jeff Dudas
But it contrasts your. That's. It's a great point that contrasts with the looks on their faces when they're Doing the manual labor, which throws back, I think, to the. Our first introduction of Sprouts, in which you've got like the happy worker.
- [12:41]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right.
- [12:43]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Pose that's being adopted. All of a sudden their faces brighten and little smiles creep in. And so it's a throwback to this kind of earlier element or your earlier theme in the show.
- [12:55]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. So let's maybe go through the three act, if you like, in order and talk about those genre. Those genre features and what they mean for the text going forward. I like the comparison. I hadn't thought of it. The found footage, you know, thing was something you've brought to the table explicitly. But I really like it. The Blair Witch Project is the interesting referent because Blair Witch was, you're right, the breakthrough text of what then became a very significant part of cinema, and especially horror cinema. The found footage thing. There'd be, you know, paranormal activities, have been millions of things that have essentially copied Blair Witch. What's interesting, I think, about Blair Witch Project is it was the first of these things. And it's also tied to one of the thematics that seems to be going on in the show, which is this notion of like the Internet and hyper connectivity and so forth. Because Blair Witch, the Internet was a different place at the time that that hit. And it was sort of the, I think the first kind of viral, extra cinematic text or the way in which the Internet and the cinematic text interacted. Because Blair Witch very famously had its. Had a website that posited that the Blair Witch things were real. Right. It was a missing person's website and that's where they deposited kind of extra textual elements. But the Internet was not sufficiently advanced either maybe in form or people's consciousness, that you instantly debunked that in fact this is real was sort of bolstered by the presence of the Internet because the Internet was taken as a repository of true information. And so it is very interesting to think about what. What argument is Pluribus making about connectivity and the absolute, you know, and social media and AI and all of those technical things that we've seen in the past. It's interesting to hearken back to Blair Witch and to use that as a comparative commentary point.
- [14:45]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, I mean, that's a really sharp point. And it also throws us back to one of the very original points that emerged out of. I think it was our discussion of the first two episodes that so much of what's happening here does appear to be a metaphor or at least an analog to the forms of communication and connectivity that we would, that we live with on a daily basis now, where, you know, through our devices, through our, the supercomputers that we carry around in our pockets with. We connect literally with everyone in real time in exactly the way that the hive mind is doing.
- [15:19]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right. And so, and so the other thing I thought of when we discover what Carol's discovered, that it is Soylent Green, that the milk is in fact people is. She's discovered a plant. And what goes on in this plant, the plant does. Isn't just a meat grinder, right? It's not feeding, crucially, I think it's not feeding whole bodies into the process. It's atomizing people first, right? It's feeding body parts, it's cutting off heads, arms, all the rest of it. They're all neatly vacuum packed. So it's. So it's atomizing people, right? It's separating people, it's taking elements of them and removing. Removing from the whole person, you know, rendering them into body parts. It's then processing them. Okay. And then it's feeding them back to the populace. Yeah, okay, so it's atomizing people. Take it, turn them into parts, process them, feeding them back to the populace, the effect of which is to create a, you know, single hive mind, is to eradicate individuality and to create a populace that's quiescent and seemingly satisfied. But to Carol and to, to, to us as individuals watching, it is only satisfied on a sort of surface level, right? It's consuming sort of junk calories, if you like that, that sort of taste good, but they're not providing the kind of deeper nutrition that you would expect to get in individuals. So maybe this is too on the nose, but does that not continue the show's seeming metaphor about things like kind of data mining and surveillance capitalism? The, the way that that feeds into the algorithmic curation of individual experience in the Internet, which is increasingly synonymous or indistinguishable from the real world. And also, you know, goes into the show's seeming metaphor about AI, you know, what is a large language model, but taking whole things, disassembling them into decontextualizing parts, processing them and feeding them back to the population in a way that you ask it a question, it gives you an answer that that is satisfying on a surface level, but is missing the kind of individuality that is really deep and nutritious. I mean, is that too on the nose or is that what's going on there?
- [17:27]
Professor Jeff Dudas
I think it may well be what's going on the nose. Maybe what's going on. And maybe it is going on the nose, literally. But I sort of get this feeling that we're not quite done with this storyline yet. I think there's a way in which it concludes so neatly. The horror HDP storyline concludes so neatly, or seems to conclude so neatly, when Diabate, it turns out, has already found out about this. But I just get the sense that there might be more to know about this. And it may well in fact revolve around the question of what is the actual function of using human additive to food products? Is it empty calories, as you suggest, or is there something essential and in a way nutritious about those human remains that are being added to their. To the food mixture?
- [18:20]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Well, I think your theory of this that we discussed, you know, just briefly before we went on camera, is that I'd seen that as essentially a sinister project, you know, that was taking people, atomizing them, decontextualizing them, and feeding them back to a populace that's kept kind of fat and dumb by them. You'd seen it instead as a. As a metaphor for. For fiction writing.
- [18:42]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, yeah. I mean.
- [18:45]
Professor Stephen Dyson
So I. I mean, do you want to unpack the. The metaphor a bit?
- [18:48]
Professor Jeff Dudas
So in. In a way, that is kind of what happens when the audience puts itself in the role of a reader. I think in particular, right. When we engage texts of fiction, what we're frequently doing is we are encountering composite personalities or composite characters who are themselves kind of stitched together, almost Frankenstein monster, like, kinds of representations of actual personality types or actual figures. And we consume those things as audience members, as readers, as viewers, as an additive part of our lives. And so the question is, or I suppose the matter is, sometimes those kinds of texts that we consume become like empty calories. They do lead to this sort of, as you say, the sort of quiescent, pacified vision of intellectual engagement, which is actually not particularly nutritious or nurturing or long lasting and connective with others. But sometimes that the audience's consumption of this sort of human composite is quite nutritious and quite enriching and is quite propelling when it comes to creating the sort of deeply engaged sets of intellectual and cultural connections that I think storytelling, that we both believe storytelling at its best can do.
- [20:27]
Professor Stephen Dyson
So like fiction is a sort of an empathy machine.
- [20:30]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah. And so one wonders if it's a.
- [20:35]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Little bit of both. Yeah.
- [20:36]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Which is kind of what leads me to wonder if this isn't the last that we've seen of a storyline dealing with the htp which would be a really nice head fake. Right. See, here's the big reveal. Oh, but now it's over and we're going to move on to other stuff. Don't worry about that anymore. It just feels like there might be more to unpack.
- [20:54]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Okay. Okay. So then we move to Dear Baddie's storyline. We moved to move to Las Vegas. There's the obvious James Bond kind of Casino Royale analogy. That's, that's going on there. He's having the time of his life. Dear Body. But it's, but it's a very strange. I don't know, maybe it's, maybe it's only strange to me. Maybe there's people who'd be really be into it. But it's a, it's a really strange fantasy that he has. And here's why I say it's strange. I mean, for two reasons. One is like, it's hugely exploitative.
- [21:24]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yes.
- [21:25]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right. And the, I know the, the, the people whom Dear Body is ordering around, which include, you know, hundreds of people just, just playing a role in his, for his enjoyment in his, in his James Bond kind of cosplay, but also include very specifically the women with whom, you know, he's having sex and that, that they're not really in their minds anymore, but their bodies are being used by him.
- [21:48]
Professor Jeff Dudas
There's no waiting on him hand and foot.
- [21:51]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, yeah. And that sort of, I mean, is the Pluribus giving collective consent? But then how does that work out? I think there's something a commenter had said several weeks ago. You know, how does that work out for the, for the individual women? But then they're not really in their bodies, but they're being used by Dear Body as, as bodies in some sense as decontextualized bodies. Right. As sort of body parts rather than people. So they mean processed in a. It's not, it's not as literal a meat grinder as act one, but, but his, his Harim, I suppose has that kind of valence to it. So it's a weird fantasy from that standpoint. And it's clearly not. This is clearly not quite a problem for him. Or he hasn't, you know, I don't know. It doesn't trouble him to a great extent. It's also a weird fantasy because his dream reality is one of extreme self regard. Right. The portraits on the wall staring back at him. The cars that he has Monday, Tuesday, Monday through Sunday different. What were they? Ferraris or whatever. You know, his, his peacocking type outfits and all the Rest of it. I had always understood the, the, the trophy girlfriends that he has. I had always understood the, the pleasure of that would be the, the social regard that that would confer upon you. Right. People see you're hyper successful. What a guy. He's got seven cars. What a guy. Look at the girls that he's with. What a. You know, here's all these portraits. What a successful person. But dear bad is. Is the only person who would possibly care about that. Do you see what I'm saying? Like it's such an interior. But, but wouldn't that rob the. Rob the. Rob it of pleasure? It's like. It's like playing golf and, and cheating when you're playing against yourself.
- [23:32]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah.
- [23:33]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Like, like what is the pleasure for that you're the only person who's experiencing that you're not getting social regard. In fact the only social collectivity is the pluribus who are either obliged virally, biologically to just do what you want or we think it seems there are hints are actually finding you a little bit pathetic.
- [23:52]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Right.
- [23:54]
Professor Stephen Dyson
So what is his pleasure?
- [23:55]
Professor Jeff Dudas
One of the things that strikes me that might be on point here is that Diabate's sort of toxic male fantasy, which is sort of put on display in the most grotesque and exaggerated of ways here is actually there's some story confusion within the James Bond universe actually now that I think about the presentation. So as we talk about the Casino Royale is at first blush the appropriate Bond text, at least in regard to the card game. But actually d', abate the fantasy that he is enacting is much earlier Sean Connery mid century sort of toxic male fantasy than the later era Daniel Craig. We actually viewers might find we did a pod with Professor Susan Burgess a couple years ago on the different stages of masculinity that are on display over the course of the James Bond filmography. And one of her really trenchant points that we spent a long time talking with her about was that the Craig era James Bond movies have a very different kind of masculinist valence than the earlier both Roger Moore and especially the Sean Connery movies have. And Diabate. On one hand, we're given the fact scenario that points us to Casino Royale, this later different kind of punishing masculinity as Professor Burgess calls it. But when it comes to the sort of off the card table action, it's pure Sean Connery, it's pure Playboy, it's pure toxic male fantasy where the pleasure is fully and completely self regarding. And so in that way maybe this helps to unravel your puzzle, which is that in those Sean Connery texts, the pleasure that is being put on screen involves a character who's frequently not performing for social regard, but is portrayed as enjoying fantasies that are almost purely bodily in character. Right in the way that Diabate is portrayed in that sense as well.
- [26:07]
Professor Stephen Dyson
There's a long conversation between Carol and Diabatti that is sort of at the core of the episode. She brings him the revelation that the Pluribus are consuming people. He's like, yeah, I already knew that, because, of course, he'd asked John Cena, as you do.
- [26:26]
Professor Jeff Dudas
So this is. But this is even more of the kind of confusion because John Cena famously, as you had mentioned, off screen, I mean, in one ways, it makes perfect sense. John Cena is famous for being a wrestler, for being a professional wrestler out of the professional wrestling world in which the outcomes are predetermined. And so there's. And with someone like Cena in particular, right, this big superstar, those big matches are choreographed, really down to the move over the course of. And they're practiced over the course of several months. And they are really a kind of almost like a balletic sort of performance. And so to the extent that what d' Abate is doing in the card game in particular, is enacting and enforcing this kind of performance of an earlier projected fantasy, it makes perfect sense that he would turn to John Cena for his kind of avatar to narrate what's happening to the extent that it exists in the real world. But it's also interesting because Cena himself has kind of broken out of. The professional wrestling world, is much more well known these days as an actor. And the types of roles that Cena has been cast in are very different. They're not the kind of toxic, masculinist roles of the Sean Connery era of James Bond. They are these kind of more, I don't know, gentle warrior kinds of roles. The action hero, who's a sensitive kind of figure as well. And so we've got this really interesting 20 minutes of this program of this week's episode that seem to be having a whole series of kind of inner filmic references that are sort of in collision with one another in really interesting and productive ways.
- [28:07]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. All right, we're going to come back to this. We're just going to take a very quick break. And we are back with our discussion of episode six of Pluribus. In the midst of this summit that Carol has with Diabarde, they talk about, I Mean, there's. Carol is trying to shock him, or he's trying to bring to Deobardi a shocking revelation that. That the Pluribus are eating people. He's not shocked by that, but he shocks her because it turns out they've been having. The. The other survivors have been having sort of zoom calls, sort of without her. And I do think Carol is written, you know, Carol's seen as a vector for satirical understandings of the human propensity for self regard, has had some stunningly, I don't know, funny, but also poignant and kind of tragic lines that show, to me at least other readings are available, that she's been written in a way that is. That is sending up that innate human propensity for literally existing within your own body and your own mind, because that's what a human is. That's one of the core problematics of the show, or dichotomies of the show, is we can only really be individuals, however much we might try and coexist collectively. And once you move beyond that, that individuality, you're into a very problematic, you know, even. Even doomed collective collectivity. So last week, the. The line I thought that was sending up that innate human trait was when Carol says, I made the whole world cry and they evacuated a whole city just to be away from me. And that proves I'm on the right track. And that. That's a tragic stanza until the last line where she says, and that proves I'm on the right track, which of course, has this delicious double meaning of I'm solving the mystery. But also, is this. This kind of satirization of the way that individuals can exist within a collectivity? And then I thought the satirization this week was when Dear Body says they're consuming the milk, the HDP or John Cena explains they're consuming this in order to erase a caloric deficit, but it's not working, and the whole population is going to starve to death in 10 years. And Carol says, but wait, you're on zoom calls. Didn't you think about including me in the zoom calls, which is such a deliberate mismatch of stakes there, that I think it's intended to be satirical?
- [30:23]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, I think it's intended to be satirical, but also what you said earlier, a bit tragic.
- [30:29]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right.
- [30:30]
Professor Jeff Dudas
So I actually think we get a slightly different portrayal of Carol this week, which is what d' Abate sort of intuits. And when he's talking on the phone to the Pluribus, he says, she's lonely. She's so lonely. Right. And we get that. And Carol is trying to connect with Diabate, actually. And, you know, she said he asks her what her plans are, you know, now that she's sort of made it to Las Vegas. And she says, well, I'm going to get a suite here and then I'll catch up with you later to plan. And he makes clear. It becomes clear that he's not actually interested in that. He was just being. It was this kind of facade of kindness or this facade of care and empathy. And Carol immediately recognizes what's happened and she sort of snaps back into the. Oh, I was just kidding. Yeah, obviously I'm not gonna hang around here. But there are these moments where it seems as though we're getting a slightly different portrayal of Carol this week, which point to something else that's deeply human and individual, which is the eventual need for connection. And so I think that's what's going on with the zoom stuff. Right. Like, she probably doesn't really want to be, like, substantively a part of these zoom conversations. Like, I mean, we know that she doesn't think much of anything of the other survivors, but it's the feeling of being left out. Right. Which just seems to compound the isolation. Her isolation, which is growing and growing and growing. That appears to be the sort of the key emotional turn Right. In that set of scenes.
- [32:14]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. And this needs to have an arc on both sides. Right. Because in terms of the pluribus learning about individuality and Carol learning how to connect authentically or exist in a wider culture. Because if it doesn't, Carol keeps saying things like, I want to put the world back the way it was, or that was a better world, which would portray her as a. And I'm just speaking in generic terms here, which would portray her as a small C, conservative, pro status quo, anti utopian actor. Certainly in the science fiction problematic. Whereas, you know, in most science fiction you're tending towards. You shake up the existing world, you introduce the novum in order to prompt reflection on its inadequacies and to produce a new world, a new. And they've produced antithesis and synth and thesis here. Right, Thesis and antithesis, Carol and the. And the Pluribus. And you need to move towards some kind of synthesis. Yeah. So maybe, you know, the pluribus is learning that the types of connection that it's forming are ultimately non nutritious or ultimately insufficiently nutritious. And Carol is also learning that she can't just be solely rejectionist of the, you know, so both sides need to. Maybe that's the resolution that they're moving towards. But both sides all to, you know.
- [33:37]
Professor Jeff Dudas
That would be a really interesting sort of narrative conclusion.
- [33:42]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, but both of which not taken literally. You know, Carol is, is in this sense standing in as an avatar for the inherent individualism of humanity and the pluribus is standing in for the inherent need, the individual as a just biologically a social animal, as in need of that kind of connection.
- [33:58]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, yeah. And there are extreme archetypes of each.
- [34:01]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right? Exactly. Exactly. So maybe that's going on. All right. So again, a really great, great episode. Really, really sort of interesting in ideological terms. I did think it was interesting that Carol brought up again that she, she writes fiction and that the reason she should be included on the zoom calls is, you know, they were talking about, we thought about robotic farming to satisfy the chlorographs. They're like robots. I could think of stuff like that all day long. Again, maybe another, another sort of meta hint. Carol had a nice hit on Las Vegas as a trillion dollar lie de pastre. Dear Body had a nice riposte, which is, you're right, it's no Albuquerque. We couldn't comment on either being here in, in Sunny Stars, Connecticut, but, but nonetheless a great episode. We, you know, as always, we value the interaction that you give us in the, in, in the comments we have. And we've tried to be explicit. We try every week we've tried explicit, explicit, especially this week, to be explicit. What are the. On what are the conceptual lenses that we're working towards? We're also explicit that we don't consume other media or understandings of the show and we don't have time to think for a long time or really talk for a long time about what the show is. That's why we call these reactions rather than, I don't know, analyses or deep dives or, you know, there are instant thoughts. So we do rely on people in the comments section to bring. To bring to us different frames. We always find it useful whether, whether you agree with us or disagree with us. Do let us know what you thought of this week's episode, of our analysis and of the. Of the show in general. But on that bombshell, this episode is.
- [35:30]
Professor Jeff Dudas
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Professor Stephen Dyson
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- [35:59]
Professor Jeff Dudas
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Professor Stephen Dyson
I am freaking out right now. I think I just peed a little.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
It's an absolute riot and the only movie that can be described as so much weirder than the last time.
- [36:18]
Professor Stephen Dyson
What last time?
- [36:19]
Professor Jeff Dudas
It's the Frequel.
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Professor Stephen Dyson
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Professor Stephen Dyson
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- [37:10]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Got it on Wayfair. Trees, lights and ornaments.
- [37:13]
Professor Stephen Dyson
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- [37:31]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And I'm Professor Jeff Dudas.
- [37:32]
Professor Stephen Dyson
And we are two political science professors who have just watched episode six seven of the Apple TV series Pluribus, episode seven called the Gap. Jeff I found this a very rich sort of brave episode. I watched it twice to be sure I was kind of understanding what's going on there. I think this is a highly kind of conceptual episode. I think we're presented with a dualism between Carol and Manusa Savedo. And that's what the episode is structured around. And the dualism presents them having, you know, paired experiences of, you know, road trips, encounters with society, so on and so forth. And we're meant to see these as very different experiences that expose a fundamental difference not just between these two people as individuals, but between sort of the world that they inhabit.
- [38:23]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, I think that that's right. Let's think about the title of the Episode the Gap. So last week I had wondered, and we had wondered collectively, how is it exactly that Oviedo is going to get through the Darien Gap? And it turns out, well, he's not going to.
- [38:37]
Professor Stephen Dyson
He's.
- [38:37]
Professor Jeff Dudas
He's actually not going to get through it. And so on one hand, the title is a literal reference, it seems to me, to the Darien Gap. But on the other hand, it's exactly what you say. It's a reference to this kind of compare and contrast exercise that the storytelling this week is doing. It's the gap or the distance between two different, very. Two very different lived and I think culturally based experiences that take the form of the characters of Oviedo and Carol. And I think this week's episode makes it even more obvious than I think that you and I believe that it has been up to this point that on one hand, this is a show that is, that means to explore the imagined personality characteristics of fictional people. Right. And attempts to fill in people like Carol or Diabate or Oviedo, and to imagine them as sort of full bodied personalities.
- [39:37]
Professor Stephen Dyson
But that's not its primary register.
- [39:38]
Professor Jeff Dudas
But on the other hand, what we have both believed that is happening in this show, and as I say, I think it's most obvious this week, is that these are characters who are meant to be archetypes. They are meant to be symbols of larger dynamics. They're meant to be stand inside in a certain way for other kinds of themes. And I think this week's explicit compare and contrast between Oviedo's journey and Carol's journey makes that exceedingly obvious.
- [40:08]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, and the way I read it, I think all that's right, I think that they're supposed to be vectors or avatars for broader ideas. And that's not to say that you cannot read the show as one of kind of psychological realism and literary fiction and have great sympathy for Carol or for Manusis or great animosity towards either of them. You can. Any reading is plausible, and especially in a show that's as multivalenced as this one, it can support multiple readings at the same time. But I think our primary thought for the show as a whole, and especially for this week, is to read it more at the level of the characters being avatars. And the primary frame, I thought, is that Carol this week is supposed to be an avatar for the experience of the developed, or what used to be called the first world, the wealthy developed world. Yeah. And Manusa Soviedo is supposed to be an avatar or a vector for the experience of the developing world, you know, and you have these series of paired experiences that are compared and contrasted throughout the episode. Beginning with a road trip, you know, both of them start being on a road trip. Carol is coming back from Las Vegas to her home in. In New Mexico. Now why is that significant? And we're reminded of that. You know, obviously that was last week's episode. She'd gone to see Dear Body. We're reminded by the road sign that she's coming from Las Vegas. So what is Las Vegas in Carol's own terms? It's like a light up ashtray. Right. I was also reminded of this, of the theorist Baudrillard who talks about kind of the nature of reality in a hyper developed, hyper. Hyper modern or postmodern country. And he uses the example of Disneyland versus America. And he says the point of Disneyland, which is this, you know, the kind of exemplification of the hyper real simulation that there's nothing real behind. That's absurdist. Essentially the point of Disneyland is not to be an escape from America. It's a mind trick or a head fake. And you're supposed to think that America is real and reasonable because you've seen Disneyland as absurd. But in fact, Disneyland is kind of koshering, I guess, if that's an appropriate word to use. The rest of America, you're told this is the absurd thing. Therefore the America you live in is real and reasonable. But in fact America is an extension of Disneyland. Well, Las Vegas, I think is fulfilling that role in Carol's journey. We're meant to see her as coming back to reality, but in fact she's bringing the absurdity of Las Vegas out in its escape out into, as it always already was, out, out into the entirety of the America, which again could be any hyper developed, quote unquote, first world country.
- [42:51]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, I think that's a sharp reading of what's happening and of the placement of Las Vegas and in where it is placed in the narrative. For me, my reference point here is a little earthier, I suppose. I go to Hunter Thompson's work and particularly his very well known book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and where he writes that Las Vegas is the literal nerve center of the American dream. And what he means is there.
- [43:22]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Actually.
- [43:23]
Professor Jeff Dudas
It's not that he means to contrast, I don't think the hyper reality of Las Vegas with the real or the imagined hyperreality with real. But rather his point is that the hyper reality that is presented in Las Vegas is in fact the real. And that this is why, for him, the grotesquery of Las Vegas is actually redolent and indicative of the grotesquery kind of at the heart of that American vision of unrestrained freedom.
- [43:52]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, I think we're actually seeing the same thing. Or maybe, maybe Bodvia and Hunter S. Thompson was saying the same thing, saying.
- [43:59]
Professor Jeff Dudas
The same things probably on different substances at the time when they said. But I think that's right. Right. And so it's important that Carol is, you know, leaving Las Vegas, so to speak, but doing so with a kind of a renewed sense of the limit less or license type characters of a certain version of freedom, which are the stock in trade in a place like Las Vegas.
- [44:25]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Well, and so for the, for the rest of the episode, Carol again as an avatar for, I don't know, first world hyper privileged decadence, rather than. It's not meant to be a character critique of a real person.
- [44:36]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yes.
- [44:36]
Professor Stephen Dyson
You know, known as Carol, but. But as that kind of exemplification, she then behaves in, you know, incredibly decadent, you know, sort of abusive, you know, hyper entitled ways throughout the rest of the episode.
- [44:50]
Professor Jeff Dudas
She's given up.
- [44:51]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, right.
- [44:52]
Professor Jeff Dudas
It's clear that she had imagined that in last week's episode she had discovered the motivating element, the thing that was going to get the other survivors on board to join her in this, what might be a kind of quixotic attempt to save the world. And so she goes to Diabate, and he not only already knows about hdp, he actually has concluded that this is leading him to a greater position of sympathy for the Pluribus rather than evidence of their horror. And so that's part of what's happening here. Right. Is that it seems to me that the narrative is setting up a fatalistic position that Carol is in. And the way that, because precisely because of the sort of highly wealthy and developed first world culture in which she finds herself in which she's placed her fatalism looks in a very particular sort of way. And it looks like, you know, stealing golf carts and playing golf and it looks like, you know, stealing lottery tickets and rubbing them off until you get a winner. Just because that's enjoyable or an ego boost, not because it means anything, it means stealing a whole load of fireworks and just blowing them up all the time. Like, what is more. What's more. What is more of a monument to privilege than being able to buy a bunch of explosives and not use them for any meaningful purpose, but you just make pretty colors.
- [46:24]
Professor Stephen Dyson
But the ideological or social critique embodied here is not that.
- [46:28]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And by the way, I love fireworks.
- [46:30]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yes. It's not that Carol has given up and is now behaving abnormally or irresponsibly. The ideological critique would be. These are actually the characteristic behaviors of.
- [46:42]
Professor Jeff Dudas
People who live in realism in this.
- [46:43]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Sort of environment in the first world countries. Right. So it's a. You know, it's a sort of an auto critique of elites by elites or of the privileged by the. By the privileged.
- [46:52]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And it gets us to the point we had talked about off camera. I know that you wanted to say something about is the. The placement of Carol's singing. Right. And it's really the. The song that she chooses the first of. I think I counted a half dozen songs that she kind of returns to that are related in one way or another to whatever the conte in which she finds herself. But the first one is REM's it's the end of the World as We Know It. And the scene cuts off as she is about to say. And I feel fine. It cuts off at the I feel. Which means it a little bit ambivalent about how she feels. But I know that you picked up on this as well and you had a particular sort of sense of why that song in particular is helpfully illuminate him.
- [47:39]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Well, So I think REM's the end of the World as We Know it could be seen as a. I think it was probably in Vince Gilligan's mind as he's writing the show. I think it can be seen as a musical sort of key to what's going on in the show as a whole. So it's a gloriously kind of self contradictory song. Just take the title, Right. It's the End of the World as We Know it that's going off in.
- [48:03]
Professor Jeff Dudas
One direction towards Apocalypse and then in parentheses.
- [48:05]
Professor Stephen Dyson
And I Feel Fine, which is going off in another direction. So you've got all these contrast or counterpoints, you know, the different valence of the. Of catastrophe versus satisfaction. The world historical. It's the End of the World and the individual's feelings. And I Feel Fine. All of that's going on in Pluribus. The song itself. Michael Stipes lyrics are this sort of stream of consciousness, you know, postmodern tour of a variety of maladies which are afflicting. Afflicting. Sorry, First World society. Some of which are natural and sort of plausible at the end of the world, others of which are just absurd things that are. And the impression you get both from the. The way the music is performed, the way the lyrics are delivered. But Also, the content of the lyrics is an individual being sort of borne in upon by a constant flow of just stuff. Some of which is TV culture, some of which is, you know, geopolitics, some of which is, you know, it's. And it's. It's all just kind of crowding in on the person and the other thing that's going on, the sort of contrapuntal nature of the song lyrically is matched by the vocal delivery or the dueling vocal deliveries. There's this concept, Jeff, I know you know this called polycephony or contrapuntal. I do it now because I told you about it and amazingly Wikipedia also knows it. So draw your own conclusions. But. But I didn't know the word but. But I'd come across it in a number of other songs where you have a dominant melody that's then matched with a counter melody. And it works brilliantly in the End of the World as We Know it because it's expressing the contradictory sentiments of the. And stakes of the song. So while Michael Stipe, particularly towards the end of the song, is singing it's the End of the World as We Know it, the Mike Mills, the backing vocalist, is singing it's time I had some time alone. Right. So the End of the World is actually an affordance of a person, for a person who's borne in upon by these postmodern hyper, real, hyper information society maladies. An affordance of some time to be alone and some time to think. And that's why they feel fine because. Because you're getting this time alone. And I think that's a master key not only for this episode, but also for particularly Carol's condition in the series as a whole.
- [50:18]
Professor Jeff Dudas
I think that's a really sharp insight and it also just doubles back upon what we were saying earlier. So the I feel fine. Right. The ability to retreat into isolation ends up being a position that one can take only because they exist in a privileged enough situation that it is okay to retreat, that it is possible to retreat. It is possible to remove oneself from the overwhelming hyper reality, so to speak, that they are experiencing. And contrast that, for example, with our other main character who's on screen this week. Oviedo.
- [50:54]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. Phrase first world problems. Is that still the phrase people use things that are not existential difficult? You know, I. Oh, I. You know, Instacart didn't deliver the right tortillas for me. I wanted whole wheat and they gave me. Yeah. Is it first world problems? Is that the phrase people still use?
- [51:12]
Professor Jeff Dudas
The commenters Will tell us.
- [51:13]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, I guess so.
- [51:14]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Oviedo is not really in a position where he can feel fine about the end of the world.
- [51:21]
Professor Stephen Dyson
No, it's existential for him. In his road trip, Carol's is from Las Vegas to America. So from absurdity to absurdity in the reading of the show. His is from a developing country to the US and it's. I know you. I think we both picked up on this. But. But it's. It's sort of explicitly a. A migrant story. And that, That's. That's what the show is trying to tell us about Oviedo's. Or. Or he's trying to have Oviedo's journey symbolized. Sorry, within the. The register of the show Forest.
- [51:50]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And just the way you were talking about this in particular off camera, the way that the two of them conduct their road trip while they're driving. Right. Consider what happens when they run out of gasoline and how they approach it. Carol pulls into a gasoline station and she calls up the pluribus, says, turn on pump lawn. Right. What does. I mean, Oviedo is presented with these. He could do the same thing. In fact, the pluribus is sort of periodically demanding that he accept their help. And he's.
- [52:16]
Professor Stephen Dyson
They're not as scared of him as they are of her or as.
- [52:20]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Cause he just ignored like he has. Has full contempt for them, but not in the kind of emotional way I suppose that we have seen affects them apparently. Affects them so much. So how does he get gasoline? Well, he siphons it from abandoned cars. And then even spite of the fact that they're abandoned, he leaves money under their windshield so as to compensate them. We've seen him do this before. He did this with the self storage units that he had to break into. He would leave money behind or a note that says, I will compensate you for this. And how does his road trip proceed? I mean, Carol's just kind of driving. Carol's journey from Las Vegas is. It's all good road. I think it's probably all the same road or at least very similar road. Whereas Oviedos, he's constantly got to refer to the map. And he goes through a whole variety of different kinds of circumstances. Sometimes the roadways are very developed, sometimes they're not. Sometimes he's in, you know, relatively developed cities like Quito in Ecuador. And sometimes he's not. And then eventually he comes, in fact to the Darien Gap. The thing we were wondering how he was going to manage to pass. He comes to it. It's the End of the road, literally. And what does he discover at the end of the road? He discovers the discarded detritus of previous migrants who have come to a place where they, they've had to discard what they're carrying because they can't any longer go on. Because the, the Darien Gap has become over the last decade in particular, sort of one of the really the primary route through which migrants have attempted to come north. You know, there's an entire sort of infrastructure, underground, illegal infrastructure, black market infrastructure, so to speak, around those train, those trails of migrants and around those paths. And that is what Oviedo is confronted with. And so, I mean, the symbolism here seems undeniably true that what has happened is that Oviedo is now a migrant, right? The road trip has become less the kind of mythologized, fantasized trip where you hop in the car and you just light off into the. Off for a better world. Now he has explicitly become a migrant and he's got a backpack and he's prepared himself, right? He's got his machete, he's got ways to make fire. He has what he needs, he thinks, to get through the Darien Gap and he's confronted by Pluribus members who are pleading with him not to do this.
- [54:48]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Well, so again, you have these parallels, right? You've got the road trips and where they're going from. And two, you've got the way that they sort of interact with the Pluribus in their guys, as I guess service workers, right? Carol is, I'm sorry, but abusive and extremely sort of entitled, like bring me a chill drink. And you didn't do it right? And next time do better. And Oviedo's manouses is, is just rejectionist. He just won't very sort of survivalist or individualist, just won't engage with them. The different attitudes towards money Carol has the money is to her, I mean, as, as it would be in reality. And again, you can read the situation as a realistic one if, if you like, we're not going to deny any, anyone else's readings, but, but money is to her an irrelevance. You know, she wins the lottery and she doesn't even care. It doesn't, it doesn't matter at all. Whereas Manusis, as you say, is sort of extremely sort of austere and wants to be right with the, with the people that he's, that he's taking things from and then they get them. You know, you have this parallel that you'd started to allude to. Between their experiences of. Of the sort of natural world.
- [55:54]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah.
- [55:54]
Professor Stephen Dyson
You know, and Manusis experiences in the Darien Gap. And it's. It's of the natural world as an existential threat toward the achievement of his goals, which, from his perspective, are absolutely necessary to the continuation of his life as a worthwhile sort of pursuit. You know. What is Carol's encounter in the natural world in this episode? She plays golf. I know you like golf. I don't play golf. So, you know, if you like golf. I'm sorry about this, but I think you can read golf within the context of this episode as a sort of wasteful use of abundant natural resources. Right. If we're talking about the natural world, you know, there's all this land that you kind of.
- [56:36]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Well, there's a wilderness and garden theme going on here.
- [56:40]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah.
- [56:41]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Golf is maybe useful for that garden type element, but it's a theme park of nature.
- [56:46]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right.
- [56:46]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Golf in the same way that a garden. A cult, highly cultivated garden.
- [56:49]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Sure.
- [56:50]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Is a theme park of the wilderness.
- [56:54]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right, right, right.
- [56:55]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Which is not what one confronts in the Darien.
- [56:58]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yes, but it's. But it's a very. It's a. If your confrontation with nature. There's two confrontations with nature in the show, one of which is the confrontation of the. Of the underprivileged, which is nature as an existential barrier and literally red in tooth and claw. The other is the confrontation of the privileged, which is cultivated. Yeah. It's this highly cultivated kind of leisure activity. And when the natural world. And the natural world in. In Carol's experience is starting to reassert itself in. As the over cultivation, or some might say abuse of nature is receding because humanity is no longer doing the type of things that lead you to transform a ton of land into golf courses. Again, I'm sorry. If you like golf. So what does Carol see on the golf course? If she sees a rabbit there and a buffalo? Because they're not constantly being kind of driven out of these spaces by traffic and cultivation and development and so forth.
- [57:52]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And the other thing we do know that is intruding in Albuquerque and has come pretty quickly is. I mean, the sort of. The wolves.
- [58:00]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. And you hear them howling.
- [58:01]
Professor Jeff Dudas
The coyotes are howling. Right. They're coming back.
- [58:03]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right, right, right, right. They also have paired experiences with. I didn't know quite how to characterize this, but. But with society or the. The notion of. Of society. Yeah. You know, so. So Carol has. Carol goes through a series of experiences as part of her exercising her new newfound Freedom and her newfound willingness to make use of the resources the pluralists supplied to her. Or just availed.
- [58:27]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Left behind.
- [58:28]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. Where she. Where she starts to appropriate things that are properly in the social realm for purely individual experiences. Right. So she goes to the Georgia o' Keeffe Museum and takes, you know, the painting. Yeah. I think it's actually supposed to be her most famous. Almost expensive. I think it's called Ginseng something. I looked it up before and someone will tell us in the comments. But she, you know, she has the poster version or whatever in her. In her home, and she's like, I'll just have the real one. So taking the social and making individual. She has a. She arranges for herself to eat out in a beautiful restaurant, but of course, she's the only person there. People have to tell us in the comments, or maybe you can tell us now how. How they read that restaurant or that experience. Sorry. Which was a recapitulation of the experiences she'd had with Helen. Right. All the food was significant. I read it as slightly ghoulish, to be honest, but. But nonetheless, it was a. That restaurant should be a social experience that she's now experiencing kind of individually. The. The music comes from the literal self playing piano, you know, which seems sort of symbolically kind of rich.
- [59:31]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And the fireworks. Right. Those are civic. That's, you know, fireworks display on 4th of July is. This is a very important civic experience.
- [59:38]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right.
- [59:39]
Professor Jeff Dudas
In a lot of American communities. And so. But she's experiencing that individually.
- [59:43]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, individually. Whereas Manousis is. His sort of reaching out to wider society is trying to learn English.
- [59:49]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah.
- [59:49]
Professor Stephen Dyson
So if you take the thematic of the show that we think the episode. Sorry, that we think we found the kind of immigrant's journey, he's sort of painstakingly accommodating himself to the culture that he hopes to join.
- [60:02]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Right. But he's not accommodating himself at all to the plural. And so this is worth, I think, highlighting. So he is. They are both. Carol and Oviedo are both contemptuous of the pluribus, but Oviedo's contempt is so profound that he literally seeks to not engage with them at all. And, you know, the scene in which he responds to the sort of. The different members who are imploring him not to go into the Darien Gap and saying, we will help you. We can get you to New Mexico by tonight, and we can take your car, too. We know how much that matters to you. And I think it's really important. When he says to them, you don't belong here. Nothing here is yours. You stole it all. And then what is his refrain as he's stumbling through the Darien gap? I am not one of them. He's not accommodating him. He's not willing to accommodate himself to the Pluribus. Carol is right. Carol is willing to, as you say, sort of eventually and haltingly take advantage of their service like elements.
- [61:12]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah.
- [61:13]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Oviedo does everything that he possibly can to avoid it. And the only reason, as you know, maybe we're going to get to now, the only reason that he accepts the help is because he almost certainly physically, medically cannot refuse it.
- [61:29]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right. But just one point before we get there, because I think it's important when I say he's, he's accommodating himself to the wider culture. I didn't mean to the Pluto. Right. I meant to English speaking culture as it exists in what is now the United States and the hyper developed country. And when you were, if you accept or if you believe that it's plausible that there is this kind of migrant story or developed world and developing world thing going on, you know, when Manusa says nothing here belongs to you and you stole it all, who is he actually saying it to? He's not saying it ideologically to the Pluribus. Right. He's saying it to the, the quote unquote, first world or you know, in academic terms, it would be sort of. This is the kind of settler colonialist critique. Right. Of kind of post imperialist countries.
- [62:16]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah. And it's. Right. And it's dramatized by things like in this week's episode by things like Carol just taking the Georgia o' Keeffe painting and appropriating it for herself. Which harkens back to the sort of long history of Ludin art. Right. Which, you know, rich cultures looting or powerful cultures looting the art of others. Right, right. This becomes a kind of a stand in for that as well.
- [62:39]
Professor Stephen Dyson
And then she's, you know, as the episode develops, she's. The golf that she plays is. She's, she's vandalizing her own hyper developed culture. Right. She's literally launching golf. You know, it's so rich that literally launching golf balls into the windows of, of kind of high rise buildings. And that also, I think is if you're reminded to read this as an, as an allegory of highly developed societies in general, or maybe America in particular, you've got a number of things going on here where these, these societies are so sort of rich and Kind of satisfied that they actually start eating themselves, they start destroying themselves. So Carol smashing windows in a high rise building, literally firing fireworks off around the place. And at one point, let's say Carol is an avatar for, I don't know, contemporary America or the hyper developed society. At one point, the firework literally points itself at her own head and she's sort of indifferent to, you know, I mean, talk about an allegory for what may or may not be going on in one or several countries at the moment.
- [63:39]
Professor Jeff Dudas
That's also the trigger, right, for her to decide that she's going to call for help.
- [63:44]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, right, yes. And the, the. Well, do you want to take a quick break and we'll come back? So. Yes. Okay, so we will be right back in just one second. And we are back with our analysis of episode seven of Pluribus. And we wanted to talk about the ways in which Carol and Manusis, you know, having, having got into trouble, sort of express their, their need for help.
- [64:04]
Professor Jeff Dudas
I do think it's important that when the firework is pointed at Carol's head, she doesn't care. She's got tons of time to react, to point it in another direction, to move herself, and she doesn't, she doesn't care. And so we do know that at this point, and this has been more than a month, I think the timeline, the chronology here is a little hazy, but it's been more than a month at this point that Carol has been back from Las Vegas. She does seem like she's reached the end of her string. And so she doesn't care if the firework hits her in the head and kills her. At this point, it barely misses her. It whizzes by her head. But that appears to be the trigger for her to, to put the fire out right in the neighboring house first and then the next day to paint the help sign that eventually brings Zoja.
- [64:56]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Well, and this is the episode, I think, telling us at this point it shifts a little bit from treating these characters relentlessly as avatars for larger themes and maybe snaps a little bit into, okay, this is now a Carol story.
- [65:11]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Right. Gets us a little bit more back into whatever the specifics of her personality.
- [65:16]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right.
- [65:16]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Have has been drawn as up to this point. Oviedo, on the other hand, again, steadfastly at all points, is con, not only refuses the help of the Pluribus, is contemptuous of it. And it's only after he, you know, suffers, you know, a shocking number of like kind of, you know, spines to the back from the. The, you know, from the palm. And only after he's done this brutal kind of like cauterization of the wounds to prevent the bacteria and infection from seeping in, his body literally gives out. And at that point, the pluribus, which has clearly been monitoring him in the same ways that a lot of migrants are monitored with high tech law enforcement as they are working their way through not so much the Darien Gap, but through the Sonoran Desert further north. They've clearly been monitoring manouces the entire time and they come to his aid, presumably, which we know he would refuse if he were physically capable of it. So both of them, as you say, end up in these positions where they. They end up needing the help of. Of the pluribus. But the way that they submit to that need for help is again, seems to be highly dependent or redolent again of the. Just the kind of. The cultural differences that create the context in which their journeys are taking place.
- [66:43]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. Although ultimately, and this is. This is a common, you know, theme in science fiction that, that whatever the cultural differences, there's a. There's a shared. There are shared traits of humanity. Right. So. So maybe what the show is telling us at this point is, however, different their circumstances. And I think we both believe that if Carol, you know, was in Manousa's, had grown up in Manousa's culture, Manus had grown up in Carol's culture. That it's not the individual. Right. It's the way that.
- [67:08]
Professor Jeff Dudas
That's the point.
- [67:10]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. That circumstances play upon individuals. And therefore you should recognize individuals who. Who are different from yourself as having an ultimate human sympathy. Because ultimately, however individualistic Manusis and Carol are in. In their own very different and perhaps culturally shaped ways that they do need that you're still a social creature. Right. You still need some kind of help. And maybe that's what the. What the show is trying to. Trying to tell us. That show ends with a version of Age of Aquarius. The Age of Aquarius is a famous sort of song from the. What is it, the 70s? No, it's 60s.
- [67:45]
Professor Jeff Dudas
The hippies.
- [67:45]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. So 60s.
- [67:47]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah.
- [67:48]
Professor Stephen Dyson
But anyway, late 60s. The notion of the Age of Aquarius is this kind of astrological notion that we exist in ages that are defined by astrological things. And the Age of Aquarius will be this notion of this sort of time of great unity and love and fellow feeling, which, again, very clever sort of musical choice. Jeff. I think we have put on the table what 95% of the most controversial issues in contemporary society. So nothing really.
- [68:16]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Only certainly 5%.
- [68:17]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. To come next week. But still really loving the show, finding it really provocative. I appreciated your company and your expertise again this week, Jeff. Always. And on that bombshell.
- [68:35]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Sam.